From Bernard Vander Beken: Highlights of the updated unit testing framework for .NET: - Attribute based mechanism for identifying test fixtures and test methods. - Automatic creation of test suites. - Improved GUI runner allowing dynamic reloading of test assemblies. - The Console runner supports XML output. - Mostly backward compatible with NUnit 1.0.

From Jesse Ezell: If the .NET show wasn't enough for you, Microsoft is producing another show. Supposed to be slightly irreverant and not for the faint of heart.

"Some of the highlights of the new release include the following: "- Attribute based mechanism for specifying test and test fixtures. "- New Forms Interface that displays Tests and TestSuites in an Explorer like fashion. The interface allows you to run individual tests and/or suites from the forms interface. "- Automatic construction of suites based on namespaces. Just provide an assembly and the test runner constructs a suite of all TestFixtures in the assembly. "- Minimal amount of effort to upgrade due to inclusion of a backwards compatibility class called TestCase and the framework also looks for methods that begin with "test" regardless of case as it did in the past. "- XML output from the console program." [DOTNET-PRODUCTS]

"The primary purpose of the tool is to be able to quickly detect node-level changes between versions of an XML document, and with enough granularity to support efficient patch and merge scenarios. The patch format can be used for fairly terse delta-encoding to transfer incremental changes across the wire as well. The tool is officially called "XmlDiff and Patch" and is implemented in managed code (sorry, no MSXML version). Currently you can only perform XML Diff through the web page, but the assembly should be available on that site very soon. I think it is considerably better than anything else available today, in terms of both performance and accuracy, and the API is a good fit with the System.Xml libraries, so it should be really easy for any VB/J#/C#/F# programmers to use." [netcrucible.com/blog]

"The approach that we take with treecc is similar to that used by yacc. A simple rule-based language is devised that is used to describe the intended behaviour declaratively. Embedded code is used to provide the specific implementation details. A translator then converts the input into source code that can be compiled in the usual fashion."

Thanks to all of the *very* active contributors, Genghis has doubled in size! This update includes:

• an automated nant build
• a framework for nunit tests
• an almost complete .NET implementation of SimplePad
• an imagelist combo box
• a preferences and window position serializer
• an MRU sample
• a custom state treeview class for doing tri-state checkboxes
• an update to ListViewSorter to make it declarative
• an expanded trace class for common tracing operations
• various other bug fixes

There’s plenty more to see and do, so check out Genghis if you’re building WinForms applications.

“The Typed DataSet that Microsoft generates from Visual Studio.NET (or from the XSD.exe tool), does not support derivation directly. In order to allow us to derive from Typed DataSets, Chris Sells and I created this tool that fixes the couple of issues with inheriting from Typed DataSets.”

“An obfuscator only delays the inevitable. With unlimited resources (time and money) and physical access to code, all code can be reverse engineered. This was true for native x86 binaries and it’s true for .NET Framework applications. What an obfuscator does is increase the cost of the effort required to reverse engineer obfuscated code. Hopefully, it increases the cost enough to make reverse engineering your code unpractical.”